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  topspin
  Last night I had a lightning strike nearby and one of two displays blanked for a second. It's behind a UPS and a good surge protector. Likely some EMI/RFI getting into the power and/or display cable of the monitor itself, toppling digital circuits in the panel and waking up the watch dog. The same display has also blanked in the infrequent case where I've discharged static on the mouse: the cables are all parallel, so they'll couple and bounce the panel ground plane, with the same outcome.These devices are built to the edge of performance margins. Throw in some high voltage transients and things flip out. I think displays are particularly susceptible due to long cables, large surface area and unavoidable shape of common displays: they're effectively patch antennas.The furniture static case is amusing: I imagine some foam cushions can cause millions of tiny static discharges in parallel when they expand. This will flow through the metal stand to "ground" and probably make a VHF range RFI spike (based on the size of a typical chair frame.) Common 24-27" display panel geometry just happens to be in the same neighborhood...Adding ferrites to cables, as I see suggested several times, might help. You could also get unlucky and make it worse: choke a line to just the right length an it becomes a better inductor/antenna. Electricity is fun.
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  MisterTea
  Might want to increase humidity. In ESD rooms the humidity is controlled and kept high to reduce static build up.to add:> In my particular case, my chair wheels are made out of plastic (non-conductive), so my solution was to “ground” my chair by adding a metallic chain from the chair to my room floor. I got the idea from reddit.The chain grounded chair is used all the time in ESD rooms. The floors in these rooms use semi-conductive flooring which is tied to a ground rod. The chair is grounded to the floor which is in turn ground bonded to earth.
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  orev
  Ferrite chokes easily fix this problem. Very useful to have a box of them in an office full of people.It’s pretty clear that most modern standards (HDMI, DisplayPort, thunderbolt, etc) are so close to their physical limits that there’s no more room for errors.
• leke
  This was happening to a colleague's monitor. As it happened frequently when either of us got up, I suspected it was the fabric of the chair, which was probably some kind of acrylic. I made slips for the ass part of the chair from 100% cotton, and to my amazement it fixed the problem.
• seam_carver
  My Mac Mini M2 sometimes blinks in November months. I've replaced my display cable recently with an HDMI to DVI cable with ferrite cores from monoprice, I'll see if it makes a difference this November.
• deckar01
  It looks like the youtube embed is broken. It is supposed to link to a EEV blog video. It is wild how many times someone brings me broken equipment and it turns out EEV blog has already investigated the same issue for the same device.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-V_Z3bD_PA
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  debo_
  Remember the "degauss" button? I had no idea what it did, but the sound it made sure was satisfying.https://youtube.com/shorts/R0OhD2Bc6FY
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  terribleperson
  I'm having the same problem, except it's crashing my dang PC. Actually, it's only crashing the GPU, but that's pretty indistinguishable from the whole PC crashing in practice.Now I'm wondering if I should ground my chair to the shelf my PC is sitting on.As pretty obvious evidence this is static related, it only happens in the winter.
• analog31
  Not an issue for the author but a rolling desk chair on one of those plastic mats made to protect a carpeted floor are the perfect storm for generating static. Also a fun fact that gas tanker trucks used to drag a chain for this reason.
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  epakai
  I played with a negative ion generator at my desk, and it was great at knocking out my 1440p monitor signal, but the 1080p seemed more resilient.Since then I got a 4K display, and it likes to drop out in thunderstorms. I switched to a better DP to HDMI adapter, and the chunky original Samsung cable. I'm waiting for the next storm to see if it helps.
• dbvn
  This has happened at our company so many times... I thought I was crazy when it seemed to be related to static electricity. But it was obvious when someone got zapped and it immediately blacked the monitor.
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  algoth1
  Many years ago I had a LG CRT that often would turn off in the exact moment I entered the bedroom. The monitor was configured to go to sleep after 20 or so minutes of inactivity, so it was supposed to turn off on its own. And I always assumed it was a case of only noticing it when it did happen (like when you buy a car and suddenly start seeing the same model everywhere)... But it always seemed uncannily frequent... Now I wonder if I might have somehow disturbed the electric field each time
• owenfi
  This happened to me just now (after seeing it a couple times on here today) and ~never? noticing this before...
• kashunstva
  This has been happening forever but only on my bike trainer setup. I have a laptop and an external display mounted in front of my handlebars. The screen will reliably go blank when I remove my outer layer as I start to warm up. I tried grounding myself but that didn’t seem to help. I had just assumed static electricity due to the Lycra shorts rubbing against the saddle. Maybe the ferrites will work.
• cpburns2009
  I have a 3 monitor setup. The one on HDMI over USB-C blinks off half of the time when I sit down, and my little Noctua desk fan will twitch.
• mft_
  Similar observation: sometimes when we get off the couch, on which we have a blanket made from artificial fibres, it causes our TV to go black for a couple of seconds. The TV is wall mounted and a metre from the end of the couch, and about 3.5’ from where we’re sitting.
• ComputerFido
  Sounds like another issue that would be much less of an issue if you just don't wear shoes in your house... Offices are another issue of course
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  ntoskrnl_exe
  I have the exact same problem, except it affects my cheapo keyboard. Almost every time I move from my desk, the Num/Caps/Scroll Lock LEDs flash up as the controller restarts. And since it's a PS/2 model, if I'm holding a key and let it go as I'm standing up, it never sends the termination sequence and keeps typing it until I press it again.I'll definitely try some of the tricks from this article.
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  gdrift
  Happened to me too with a new chair.I suspected static electricity. The solution was a thin cotton pillow on the seat. Problem gone.
• ButlerianJihad
  I don't use microSD cards anymore, but they had been in my feature phone as well as my Raspberry Pi. I ran into so, so many problems with the Raspberry Pi related to storage. It would lock up at the drop of a hat. It would often have major trouble reading/writing the sdcard, especially at startup. My phone, for its part, would complain about a corrupted filesystem, or couldn't access files, immediately after I replaced the sdcard in its slot.Of course I live in the Phoenix metro area, and it's dry all year round. So I began taking some extraordinary measures. Of course, I had a little "repair kit" containing one of those basic ESD wrist straps. I used that. I would also do all card swaps in the bathroom without a mat. I would also, you know, remove any garments that could possibly generate ESD in any way! And, I invested in the heavy-duty, rugged type of sdcards like you'd find in a GoPro on a skydiver's kit.These days there isn't anything using sdcards anymore. My Pixel 8 Pro doesn't even have a slot for it. I'm thankful, because USB thumb drives are more resistant to this stuff, and I make use of those very sparingly, as it's mostly about cloud storage now.
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  mzajc
  I have a similar problem, except instead of shutting things down, static discharge seems to wake my computer up (from suspend-to-ram). I have yet to figure out why that happens, but it's not the mouse or keyboard.
• amiga-workbench
  One of my monitors just did the same thing yesterday as the compressor in my office minifridge shut off.I don't think my DP cables have any ferrite chokes built in...
• cyclopeanutopia
  I find this very interesting, especially given that there is a paper from 1993 (linked in the artcile) that explains the issue, but it is still happening - and maybe nowadays even more than ever?
• PunchyHamster
  I had that with cheapo mechanical keyboard, on particularly dry office days I could hover my hand over it to make it crash and restart
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  Daunk
  This happens to me when I brush off my mousepad too fast with my palm. It will also cause my wireless headset to "reboot".
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  Animats
  Make sure that all your wall outlets in the area are actually grounded. Get an outlet tester at a hardware store and check. They cost about $10. Good first step. There are sometimes 3-prong outlets where the ground connection is not connected, especially in older buildings. This is an electrical code violation, so if there's a landlord involved, get them to fix it.Laptop plus external monitor is an interesting case. The monitor should be grounded via its power plug, but the laptop's ground may be floating. Not sure about the grounding path for Apple laptops. Attempts to find info on laptop grounding online are returning AI slop. If everything is running off 2-prong plug external power supplies, there may not be any grounding.Get the room humidity above 40% and most static effects will disappear. The water in the air grounds them out. That's often the easiest solution.There are electrostatic field meters. Halfway decent ones start around US$150. I used to have a surplus store field detector on my desk when assembling electronics. It would squawk if the field level got high. Wearing a wrist strap would shut it up. With a meter, you stop guessing. This isn't mysterious, just something that needs instrumentation to chase down.The chair chain is good, but make sure that the shiny enameled chain and the floors are actually conductive.
• Topgamer7
  I thought it was me bumping my table. But now you have me wondering if it's charge buildup.
• s09dfhks
  The sound card on my windows computer dies if i turn the desk fan i have off! I should try it
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  kalaksi
  Any idea if ESD can damage the monitor over time?
• Geof25
  Sounds like very cheap monitor which had lot of cost cutting done on side of protections of inputs.I would not be surprised that touching such monitor will electrocute you.
• simoncion
  Some folks are suggesting ferrite beads, others are suggesting shorter cables.If one has a medium-sized chunk of money to burn, one could try fiber optic cabling. I've personally had -AFAICT- perfect results from Monoprice's "SlimRun AV" fiber DisplayPort cables, and Nippon Labs' fiber HDMI cables. [0] I expect that Monoprice's fiber HDMI cables and Nippon Labs' fiber DisplayPort cables are also fine, but I've never used those, so I cannot comment.For folks concerned about "dreadfully fragile" fiber optic cables, I do know that the Monoprice cables are durable... a vigorous misadventure caused me to torque the hell out of the monitor-side connector. The connector bent, forcing the case split a bit at the seam. After some counter-bending of the connector and pushing its case back mostly closed, the cable works fine. Given the outward similarity in build quality, I expect that the Nippon Labs cable I have is at least as durable.[0] Both families of cables drive my "4k" HDR monitor at 60Hz without lossy compression.
• secretsatan
  This happened all over our office for a while after we got new monitors, it was the pneumatic jacks (?) in the chairs compressing triggering them, it took a while before anyone figured it out, IT eventually went round and put ferrite cores on all the cables for the monitors and that seemed to fix it.
• throwanem
  Shorten the display cable.
• poolnoodle
  I freaking hate my Ikea chair. Thing shocks me every time I get up from it and then touch it.